limits we have assigned to this article; and therefore we will content ourselves with the statement of a few leading principles in respect to physical education. 1. Physical education is the education of the body for its appropriate functions in the complex economy of human life. 2. The work of physical education is chiefly negative, or rather preventive. If the body is guarded against disease, if the causes of disease, such as filth, unwholesome food, and perilous exposure, are avoided, and disease itself, when it occurs, is treated with judicious remedies, nature will ordinarily do the rest. To educate the mind, to develop and discipline its faculties, is a work requiring great skill and diligence; but nature, if she be not violated, educates the body. The teeth, both in the first growth and the second, like Dogberry's reading and writing, "come by nature." The stomach and the bowels, if not abused, need no schoolmaster to make them do their office. The muscular system, the osseous system, the nervous system, all grow as naturally as a cabbage. Physical education, then, consists essentially in letting nature do her own work. 3. "Physical education should be commenced in the family." It belongs chiefly to the family. The mother, the father, and such as supply the place of mother and father, must take the human animal in its earliest years, and see that no malignant influences, or disastrous habits, implant in the constitution the seeds of disease. 4. "The body was made for action, and it cannot with impunity, either by violence or stealth, be cheated out of it." 5. Starvation will not answer instead of bodily exercise. "The only safe way is to give nature her portion of meat in due season, so combined with exercise, as to secure to the digestive organs an untiring vigor in the right performance of their work." 6. There is in the constitution of human nature a great power of adaptation to circumstances. If the human animal grows up in circumstances requiring great muscular strength, the constitution adapts itself to the exigency. The sailor, accustomed to look out inquiringly over the wide expanse, acquires great compass of vision; while the proof-reader grows quick-sighted and shortsighted. Thus the body can be trained to endure a great amount of any particular kind of exertion, without being able to endure a similar amount of another kind. Thus, too, the various portions of the system will develop themselves according to the amount of action required of them. 7. In order to the complete physical education of a student, it is not necessary, that he be trained to great muscular strength, or great acuteness of the senses, but only to complete health. The development which he wants, is of intellectual not of muscular power, of the brain, the organ of thought, not of the power of sight or hearing. He may have the brawny shoulders of a porter, or the sinewy arms of a blacksmith, and be none the more able to contend in the strife of mind with mind. He may have the far-reaching ken of a sailor, and see none the better on that account into the dim distances of history and philosophy; or he may have the microscopic eye of a professional proof-reader, and be none the more able to split hairs in metaphysics. All that he needs in this respect, is a body in which the action of all the organs is regular and healthful. 8. The exhaustion consequent upon intellectual effort, is a weariness of the body and not of the soul, and is occasioned, if we may so speak, by the expenditure of vital power in the action of the brain. If therefore we add to that weariness the weariness consequent upon any other kind of labor, we only draw more largely on the living energy of the system. 9. "Of all drudgery, that of being compelled to exercise merely for the sake of exercising is the greatest." 10. The division of labor being the first element of civilization, and essential to excellence in any department of labor, it is not to be expected, save perhaps in some few extraordinary cases, that the same man will be a skillful mechanic and a good scholar. He who attempts to be both, will probably be neither. 11. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Every one who works, needs not merely change of work, but relaxation, diversion, play, to exhilarate and refresh. Manual labor in a mechanic's shop may be very good play to those who have a taste for such amusements, but work done in play is not worth much in the market. 12. The instinctive desire of muscular action, if it has free scope, will prompt to as much bodily exercise as is essential to health. A child will play without being taught. The school-boy will play enough, without being driven to it. The young man in college will play with his fellows at one athletic game and another, till some false ideas of propriety, of manliness, or of gentility, take possession of his mind, and he undertakes to put away childish things. 13. The great security for health in sedentary men, is cheerfulness, a constant vivacity of mind, that will not stoop to fretfulness or anxiety. That convulsive motion of the diaphragm, sometimes called laughter, is an excellent promoter of digestion; and when the mind unbends itself in sport, and laughter fills the soul, the machinery of the system is unconsciously winding itself up for renewed action. The anxious man, who cannot take things contentedly, as they are ordered or permitted in God's providence; the man who is too gloomy or too stately to be heartily amused, and whose laughter is only superficial, never shaking up his system, never surpassing the decorum of a smile like that of Cassius, is the man to grow dyspeptic, to read one author after another on diet and digestion, to wear himself down to a shadow with laborious bodily exercise that profiteth little, and finally to present himself to the public as a mournful example of the neglect of physical education. 14. If a student has been bred to manual labor, for example to some mechanic art, it may ordinarily be wise for him to mingle such labor with study, at least in the earlier stages of his education; and that, not only because a sudden and entire change in his habits may be fatal to his constitution, but because the avails of his strength and skill may afford him important aid in respect to the expenses of his education. 15. No college, except in very extraordinary circumstances, can be expected to employ its pupils in agricultural or mechanical labors without great pecuniary loss. We need not go into the theory of this. Probably the experience of those institutions who have given to the scheme a fair and full trial, if frankly communicated to the public, would supersede the necessity of any theoretical exposition. If the student who has strength and skill for labor, cannot find profitable employment in some of the gardens or workshops constantly demanding labor within a mile of the college, his college, we may be sure, cannot find it for him by setting up workshops or laying out gardens. 16. It is not true, at least it is yet to be proved, that students in colleges are, on the whole, more subject to bodily ailments, than young men of the same age in workshops and manufactories. How many of the students in a college are persons for whom a sedentary life was chosen, simply or chiefly because of the feebleness of their physical frame. If a father or a mother is to select one son out of the family to be sent to college, upon which one will the choice fall? Upon that stout sunburnt boy, who never had a sick day, and whose strong arm will soon be so helpful? or upon that delicate child, doubly dear to his mother for the painful hours, that she spent over his cradle, and for the constant watchfulness, that is necessary to keep him from sickness whenever he has been exposed to rain or cold? Which is most likely to be a lover of his book, he whose voice is the loudest in the ring, whose foot is the fleetest in the race, and whose joyous consciousness of muscular energy makes him ambitious for labor? or that gentle boy who, while his brothers, in the exuberance of life, are scuffling and leaping, lies in the grass weaving his green chain of dandelion stalks? What sort of a boy was Beattie's Edwin? "Concourse, and noise, and toil, he ever fled, "Th' exploit of strength, dexterity or speed, and why? Why because he was a boy of delicate frame, not made for powerful muscular action, and eminently susceptible of disease. Nothing is more natural, than that more than an average share of such boys should find their way to college. These are the Polloks and the Kirk Whites, in whom disease becomes the stimulus of genius, and whose light burning with unnatural brightness burns out and dies. "Whom the gods love, die young;" not for the want of manual labor in colleges, but because such is the law of nature. Yet, so far as our observation goes, the young men in college, taken as a body, are not, on the whole, more liable to disease and death than young men in other employments. Our doctrine is then, that the less colleges have to do with manual labor departments, the better for their pupils, and the better for the cause of education and sound learning. It is to another sort of improvement, that colleges are called in these days, when the intellect of the people, stimulated by freedom and the diffusion of knowledge, is every where waking up; when new ideas are pervading all orders in society; and when there is, consequently, an increased necessity for a large class of minds, prepared by thorough discipline as well as by native power, to lead and control the growing excitement and energies of the popular intellect. While with such liberal hand our public institutions dispense their treasures of knowledge, and wake up around themselves the insulated energies of talented minds, the laws of self-preservation demand, that by double diligence they hold their relative eminences, to prevent the faltering of public confidence, and literary pedantry in single departments, and the filling of the land with half-made, self-made, selfwilled ultra men, conflicting with common-sense and one another, and united only in their contempt of a regular education, and their eulogies of modern mental supremacy and a short meter course. While the mass of mind rises, and coruscations of self-taught mind break out and dazzle, and do wonders, our colleges and seminaries must rise above all heights of successful competition, to command respect and hold back society from feverish effervescences as it approaches to an elevated standard of universal culture; and wo to the republic when our colleges, those orbs of intellectual day, shall fail to command respect, and by the formation of mind and morals, to disseminate knowledge and holiness through the land. pp. 32, 33. How ought colleges to be constituted and governed? We will not speak here of the best mode of guarding the endowments of a college from waste or perversion, and of securing the appointment of able instructors; we will only advert to this single aspect of the question,-shall the students be governed by law and authority, or shall they be governed by their own will and wisdom? The question seems to admit of but one answer. Yet the general relaxation of domestic discipline, the disorganizing ideas of liberty which from so many sources are distilled into the minds of the young, and the crisis which is so fast developing in the history of this nation, give to this question a most serious importance. Our colleges must maintain a perfect subordination, or their influence will be disastrous. The first lesson of the student must be that of subordination to the rule of law and of those whom the law sets over him. Otherwise he will be educated to be not an orb of light wheeling in its appointed track, but an erratic star, full of malignant influences. This tendency of personal liberty to the subversion of laws, is with us the epidemic of the day. The genius of our government has breathed a spirit of relaxation through all our systems of education from the cradle upward. Instead of increasing the efficiency of early discipline and habits of subordination through every form of social preparatory government, we have thrown the reins presumptuously upon the neck of childhood and youth, trusting to the efficiency of law to meet and curb and tame their fiery insubordination. In our contempt of the arbitrary inequalities of monarchical governments, our zeal has overacted to the overthrow of those constitutional distinctions of intelligence, and virtue, and authority, inseparable from the existence of well regulated society. Instead of environing the rising generations with paternal vigilance and a mild efficient government, to qualify them by habit for coming responsibilities, we have blamed the severity of our fathers, and ridiculed their particularity, and in the supremacy of our wisdom, sent our children, ungoverned at home, to meet the responsibilities of the school, of the college, and of public life. And they, rocked to sleep in the nursery by the songs and eulogies of liberty, deem it an unseemly indignity to their native independence, to be compelled to obey, and their young republican blood makes insurrection, and the wise, weak-hearted parent submits; hoping they will be ashamed of their conduct when they come to years of discretion-an era which few ungoverned children ever reach. The same unsubdued spirit of republican independence goes murmuring through the common school with oft repeated breakings out of a rebellious will. The academy sometimes conquers and sometimes is conquered sometimes compromises, or concedes a truce; while in the college with increasing frequency it attempts the subjugation of the powers that be, to the popular will. In the meantime our patriotic politicians and never was a nation blessed with such a multitude of them-have so long and so constantly assured the sovereign people of their power, and their own implicit subjection to them, that they have taken it into their heads to be above not only their servants, but above themselves as acting by their own officers and their own laws; so that by the deceitful influence of our |